Irony in Tim O’Brien’s How to Tell a True War Story Essay

O’Brien says how “a true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe” (74). Consequently, the stories shared are often exaggerated, but are still legitimate because they aim to relay the feelings the person has about the topic and emphasize the points that are most significant to them. This further increases the understanding of the audience and aids them in understanding the magnitude of the situation for the speaker. O’Brien displays this when describing his decision on going to war. He says, “At some point we must’ve passed into Canadian waters, across the dotted line between two different worlds” (53). Although we don’t know whether O’Brien actually went on this trip, there is no doubt that he was conflicted over going to war. This scene helps visualize this internal strife and gives an insight into his perspective, making it the truth. Thus, something can be true if the sentiment and relevance that corresponds with it is in accord with the message the author wishes to

The first three words of the chapter “How to Tell a True War Story” are, “This is true” (67). Although Tim O’Brien begins this chapter with such a bold and clear statement, throughout the chapter he has the reader thinking and confused when he contradicts himself by stating things such as, “In many cases a true war story cannot

Tim O’Brien uses several rhetorical strategies in this story. A strategy that is easily found in the story is imagery. He uses a lot of sensory details to help the reader know what it feels like in a certain situation. “Except for the laughter things were quiet,” (67) and “You hear stuff

With this part of the story, O’Brien is able to inject the theme of shame motivating the characters in the book. This chapter is about how the author, who is also the narrator, is drafted for the war. He runs away to the border between Canada and the United States, he stays in a motel with an old man for about a week and finds that he should go to war for his country. In the beginning it was about shame, he didn’t want to look like a coward because in truth he was scared. He was afraid to face the pressures of war, the humiliation and the fact of losing “everything”. This man was an average person who lived an average life with no problems, until he got the notice about the war, which caused the shame and fear of being seen as a bad person to come out.

     In “How to Tell a True War Story” O’Brien explores the relationship between the events during a war and the art of telling those events. O’Brien doesn’t come to a conclusion on what is a true war story. He writes that one can’t generalize the story as well. According to O’Brien, war can be anything from love and beauty to the most horrid

When truth became distorted by the ambiguous or absent motive for war, the soldiers needed to make up their own truths in order to keep sane enough to live through the senselessness and fear. Along with the fact that O’Brien’s boyhood died after killing the man in the path, his conception of truth died as well. He examines this fact when his daughter Kathleen asks him, “Daddy tell the truth, did you ever kill anybody?” and O’Brien ponders this stating, “And I can say, honestly, ‘Of course not.’ Or I can

O’Brien’s unification of fact and fiction is to illustrate the idea in which the real accuracy of a war story is less significant than storytelling. The subjective truth about what the war meant and what it did to change the soldiers is more meaningful than the technical details of the

1. According to O'Brien, how do you tell a true war story? What does he mean when he says that true war stories are never about war? In what sense is a “true” war story actually true? That is, in O’Brien’s terms, what is the relationship between historical truth and fictional truth?

The exaggeration that O'Brien expresses in his story, also known as hyperbole, gives the reader a feeling of speaking with a man that just experienced the war of his life an hour before you two are speaking. The emotion is

Telling a war story will be changed for everyone depending on their experience and the different wars they been to. In The Thing They Carried telling a true war story is different because O’Brien says that it needs to be a heroic and noble and very specific “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seems to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed” (pg.67-68) it shows how O’Brien wants to impress the audience with his stories that makes one wonder if it is real or not. He wants to sound heroic which makes part of the purpose of the story, his side

     According to the author Tim O’Brien, people tend to readily accept the ‘facts’ presented of what happened during a war. People do not consider the existence of fallacies regarding the actual stories of what happens in wars, few consider that the ‘facts’ of an incident often change through people’s words. The film ‘Saving the Private Ryan’ by Steven Spielberg features both facts and seemingness part of the war story. Since it is so difficult to fully describe a war using human language, Spielberg ended up revising his stories to make sense out of it. Spielberg included parts that did not occur or exclude parts that did occur in order to make their stories seem more credible. According

"The difference between fairy tales and war stories is that fairy tales begin with 'Once upon a time,' while war stories begin with 'Shit, I was there!'" (Lomperis 41). How does one tell a good war story? Is it important to be accurate to the events that took place? Does the reader need to trust the narrator? In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien examines what it takes to tell a good war story. He uses his own experiences in Vietnam in conjunction with his imagination to weave together a series of short stories into a novel.

Tim O’Brien reminds us that true war stories are never moral. A war story is true if it is obscene and evil, with no virtue. A true war story will have no examples of the way humans should behave (514). The contributing authors absolutely influence the perception of the war, their works are meaningful, powerful. Further, we have the luxury of 20/20 hindsight and a PBS documentary that took 10 years to complete to consider when forming our opinion. Personally, I am grateful for the influence media and writings have on perceptions of warfare. I am coming to understand my grandfather who served in the Navy and the biases he brought home from the war. While I disagree with them, I am beginning to see where they originate from and why even at the

In the chapter “How to Tell a True War Story,” the narrator attempts to define war, but observes that to generalize war is to deny the truth of it: “War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead” (Things... 87). Later in the novel, one of the soldiers is telling his buddies a story he heard about a man who flew in his girlfriend and had her live in Vietnam. As he tells the story, the young medic, Rat Kiley, continually interrupts himself to insert points of clarification and personal analysis of his own story. His comrades complain about this obtrusive trait and try to tell him, “All that matters is the raw material, the stuff itself, and you can’t clutter it up with your own half-baked commentary. That just breaks the spell. It destroys the magic … trust your own story. Get the hell out of the way and let it tell itself” (Things… 116). Rat Kiley behaves rather like the author of a history book, describing one piece of a story and then stopping to analyze it repeatedly. His friends are trying to convince him to stop interfering with his own story and just let it be told; historical novels must be used for the same purpose: to tell the story that’s been lost among

O’Brien argues that truth is affected by war in that truth is not black and white when it comes to war. Often, the things you find hard to believe are the true stories and the ones that seem like they are possible are not true. He argues that in a true war story, “there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue,” but it is actually that quality that tells you whether or not it is true. This is different than how we see truth outside of war. We believe things that seem plausible to be true. He also makes the point that truth pertaining to war is not black and white. It is not binary. Most truths in war stories are somewhere between true and false. The author makes the point that “war is also mystery and terror and